I was eager to see how Christopher Hitchens would handle the flood of new books re-evaluating Winston Churchill's role in World War II ("The Medals of His Defeats," April Atlantic), but my reading ground to a halt right on the first page, at the paragraph that poses questions about who was first to act. Let's look at the three cases cited:

"Against which nation was the first British naval attack directed?" Why, against Germany, of course, since the naval war began with the Royal Navy's campaign to destroy German commerce raiders like the Graf Spee, in 1939, and to contain the U-boats. Severe sea battles against the German navy occurred off the Norwegian coast in early April of 1940. Hitchens's answer is "Against a non-mobilized French fleet ... in North Africa." Hmm.

"Which air force was the first to bomb civilians, and in whose capital city?" The answer given is "The RAF, striking the suburbs of Berlin." That is perhaps the most egregious reply of the three. Did not the war open with the ruthless Luftwaffe bombing of the cities and civilians of Poland, especially Warsaw, even before the British Parliament had declared war?

Finally, "Which belligerent nation was the first to violate the neutrality of Europe's noncombatant nations?" "The British, by a military occupation of Norway"—wrong again. German forces landed on Norwegian soil before the Anglo-French expedition, though by just a few days. Germany had already invaded Denmark before the Allied landing in Norway. I suppose we are not allowed to include Stalin's invasion of Finland, on November 30, 1939, because Russia was not a "belligerent nation." At least not until it invaded. Again, hmm.

I am not saying that Hitchens himself is making these false claims; indeed, he cautiously opens the paragraph by referring to "events that one thinks cannot really be true," as if suspecting already that some of the authors are bent on a "trash Churchill" vendetta. But if this sort of misinformation gets widely circulated, it will make the task of assessing Churchill's strengths and weaknesses—his role in history, warts and all—more difficult than it actually is.

I was amused by Christopher Hitchens's statement that Churchill's "declining years in retirement were a protracted, distended humiliation of celebrity-seeking and gross overindulgence." It is worth remembering that this was the period during which Churchill wrote the acclaimed The Second World War, in six volumes, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, in four volumes. We all know that Winston liked his brandy, but to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln's comment on being told that General Grant had a tendency to tipple, "Perhaps we should find out what brand he drank, and order a barrel!"

On June 4, 1940, Churchill delivered his "We shall fight on the beaches ..." speech to the House of Commons. Afterward the Prime Minister went to the BBC studio at Shepherd's Bush to deliver the same address, which would be beamed to the Commonwealth nations and the United States. Unfortunately, the transcription apparatus broke down at the BBC. Although it went out live, the BBC did not have an oral recording. They asked Churchill to come back and deliver it again. Churchill refused. So Norman Shelley, the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh on the BBC, who was known for his clever mimicking of Churchill, delivered—unbeknownst to Churchill—the address. The Shelley rendition was for excerpts in later news and for records to be played at bond rallies and patriotic events.

As to the drinking charge, Lord Moran, Churchill's physician, in his not very sympathetic biography, said flatly that he never saw any evidence of Churchill's drunkenness.

The typical alcoholic conceals his intake. Churchill, however, would brag of his drinking. But he claimed more than he consumed. He would constantly top off his own glass of whiskey or brandy with more soda water from the siphon bottle—while replenishing the glasses of his guests with spirits. I must say that many people have come to tell me how Churchill seemed tipsy at a reception before dinner and then later delivered a masterly address. The reason is that Churchill could not control his lisp and stutter in conversation. The result was a "slathering" of words. In his speeches, which he carefully prepared, he could control his lisp and stutter.

Finally, despite the duties of high parliamentary office, Churchill produced more published words than Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck combined. That in itself belies the drunkenness charge. In addition, no one with a drinking problem could live past the age of ninety, as Churchill did.

James C. HumesRyals Professor of Language and LeadershipUniversity of Southern ColoradoPueblo, Colo.

Norman Shelley did not broadcast Churchill's speeches. The BBC has gone into this in tremendous detail and has discovered that the original recordings were mislabeled.

Andrew RobertsLondon, England

Norman Shelley's ridiculous notion that he delivered Churchill's wartime speeches over the BBC, fanned assiduously by David Irving, has for years been laid to rest by eyewitness testimony. What Shelley recorded, after the war, was an obscure, unpublished Churchill speech, the origin of which has eluded even the Churchill Archives. Amusingly, Hitchens even gets the lie wrong: Shelley's role in The Children's Hour was Dennis the Dachshund, not Winnie-the-Pooh. Poor Shelley can't win.

Richard M. LangworthThe Churchill CenterHopkinton, N.H.

I found it interesting that your April issue contained both an article on plagiarism, by Richard A. Posner, and an example of the point Posner was making. Christopher Hitchens includes a paragraph comparing Churchill and Lincoln that ends with the sentence "In his contradictions he contained multitudes." That's nicely lifted from Walt Whitman ("Song of Myself"), and I'm left wondering if Hitchens assumed that his readers would recognize the line (and appreciate the Lincoln-to-Whitman-to-Churchill literary double play). Whether used intentionally or not, it made for a brilliant ending to the paragraph, allowing it to "glitter with stolen gold," in Posner's words.

Mark HizaExeter, N.H.

Christopher Hitchens replies:

Paul Kennedy is obviously not accusing me of not knowing the date of the outbreak of war. It goes without saying that any meeting between British and German naval vessels was by definition hostile any time after September 3, 1939, and of course there were several exchanges of fire in that time. However, there was nothing like a premeditated fleet action, coordinated across a wide area, until the simultaneous bombardment of the French at both ends of the Mediterranean, which Churchill considered to be a hinge event in a way that the other engagements were not. My purpose in pointing this out was to challenge the received opinion, so I don't mind restating it.

Professor Kennedy again mistakes my purpose in asking which air force struck first at whose capital. In the context I was clearly asking this as between London and Berlin during World War II. If I had wanted to ask which capital was the first to be bombed (since Professor Kennedy himself says that the bombing of Warsaw was before the declaration of war), I would have chosen Madrid, bombed by the Nazis at a time when Churchill was still on their side in Spain.

The British invaded Norwegian territorial waters on April 8, 1940, in order to push ships carrying iron ore into international waters. That was a clear violation of neutrality. The German attack on Scandinavia began the next day. And again, had I wanted to discuss neutrality in general, I could have cited the Molotov-Ribbentrop carve-up of the Baltic States, which preceded the Soviet invasion of Finland. (Incidentally, Churchill himself declared war on Finland, in order to gratify Stalin, in December of 1941.)

In 1990 a Cambridge, Massachusetts, speech-research group named Sensimetrics tested twenty of the BBC broadcasts sold on long-playing records under Churchill's name. The voice patterns were different in three speeches: the "Fight on the Beaches" speech, the "Finest Hour" speech, and the "Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat" speech. Ten years later Norman Shelley's son found an LP of his father delivering the "Fight on the Beaches" oration, which was verified by a professional sound engineer and also by the presence of Shelley's own voice at the end of the recording. There is now only a dispute about when, and how often, Shelley (who did also play Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC) acted as His Master's Voice.

I should not want to quarrel with those who argue that alcohol and rhetoric can be advantageously mixed, and I hope I did not say anything to offend those who believe otherwise. However, some of Churchill's worst speeches were delivered from the bottle's mouth, and some of his best could not, as we now have reason to know, have been delivered at all without the deputizing of an impersonator. His later histories both suffer from defects and, as with the case of the Katyn massacre, contain unpardonable and self-interested revisions of the truth. As to longevity, an entirely pickled Queen Mother has just died at the age of 101.

Finally, I confess myself quite caught out by the relentless detective work of Mark Hiza. I am confident that had I written that Churchill asked his people for the last full measure of devotion, or that he bestrode the narrow world like a colossus, another sleuth would have found me out just as skillfully.

Cross-dressers

Amy Bloom ("Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses," April Atlantic) says she doesn't "want to demonize or pathologize any sexual preference or behavior that doesn't hurt anyone." But cross-dressing does hurt people! It hurts the women who were lied to, and who are abandoned when they cannot respond sexually to their cross-dressing mates. It hurts children of the divorce, many of whom will never understand why Dad left. Both Mom and Dad will keep Dad's secret, assuming that it is something the children should never know.

Research from East Tennessee State University indicates that the women involved with cross-dressing partners are usually first-born children, and tend to be more liberal and more highly educated than average. They are, as Bloom points out, not lacking in self-esteem. In fact, it is their strong self-esteem that allows them to accept relationships with their cross-dressing mates. This may, however, become a threat to the cross-dresser, posing a contradiction—the need for a woman strong enough to accept his cross-dressing, but one sensitive to his sexual needs.

Cathy ConnellanSterling Heights, Mich.

As a married heterosexual crossdresser, I must take issue with Ray Blanchard's heated (to use Amy Bloom's characterization) assertion "Of course it's not relaxing. Heels and makeup and a wig and a corset? It's preposterous." For me, wearing these and other associated habiliments is indeed relaxing, if not physically then psychologically, and I know from their personal attestations that other cross-dressers agree. Blanchard would be surprised at how truly comfortable a properly fitted and laced corset is!

For the record, and contrary to Bloom's composite portrait, my wife is a professional with a master's degree, and in the thirty years I have been a registered voter, I cannot remember once voting for a Republican.

Jamie RobertsLightfoot, Va.

Virgil's Prose?

I was surprised to see a reference to the "prose" of Virgil's Aeneid in a magazine as literate and sophisticated as this ("An Ireland of Legend," March Atlantic). Though the general reader may consider it a technical point, the distinction between prose and poetry is worth affirming. As the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, the former refers to the "ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure," the latter to a "composition in verse or metrical language." The point of difference is meter, a system of linguistic measurement arising from natural structures within the native language. We need not know the technical term for the metrical system of Virgil's Aeneid—dactylic hexameter—to realize that the epic is composed of regularly measured lines, or that it most assuredly is not in an "ordinary form" of language.

Cullen Murphy's "Delete, Baby, Delete" (May Atlantic) gave as an example of effective deletion the burning of a handwritten manuscript of Thomas Carlyle in 1835. The story I recall reading somewhere, perhaps in your pages, about Carlyle's burnt manuscript has it done by his own servant, not by John Stuart Mill's maid. Also, the deletion failed. It left intact Carlyle's memory bank. After the destruction of the written word (according to my account, which makes Murphy's point better than his account), Carlyle simply sat down and rewrote the entire volume from memory, word for word. An effective deletion in this case would have involved burning not only the manuscript but Carlyle.

Jim LeinMinot, N.D.

Cullen Murphy replies:

No, it was Mill's maid. But Jim Lein's point about memory is apt.

A General Rule

In language, long-standing tradition signals legitimacy. If so, Word Court "Judge" Barbara Wallraff (March Atlantic) is mistaken to rule that the title "General" is reserved for the military. In many southern states (south of Boston, anyway) it has long been proper to address an attorney general as "General." In the Supreme Court of the United States—a higher court than Word Court—the U.S. Attorney General, the U.S. Solicitor General, and state attorneys general are addressed as "General" by the justices.

It is therefore both legitimate and appropriate for Secretary Fleischer to refer to "General Ashcroft."

Wayne E. UhlCarmel, Ind.

Barbara Wallraff replies:

I called Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio's legal-affairs correspondent, to ask if she agrees with Wayne Uhl. "He's generally right," she told me. "I've always heard the Supreme Court justices call the Attorney General of the United States 'General.' I don't normally hear them call the Solicitor General 'General'—they don't usually call him anything; he's there all the time. When state attorneys general argue cases before the Court, if the justices are going to address them as anything, they usually call them 'General.'" With respect to jurist generals, then, Word Court stands overruled, and thanks to Wayne Uhl for bringing this to our attention.

It remains true, nonetheless, that most civilians with the word "general" in their job titles are not properly addressed as "General." The letter Uhl refers to asked about "civilian generals" of all sorts: "Surgeon, Solicitor, Comptroller, Director, and so forth," as its author put it. The Office of the Surgeon General tells me that the appropriate courtesy title is either "Dr." or "Vice Admiral" (because the Surgeon General heads up a uniformed corps of the Department of Health and Human Services)—never "General." And according to a spokesperson for the Comptroller General of the United States, the right title to use for the incumbent, David M. Walker, is plain old "Mr."

Tennis

Marshall Jon Fisher ("Tennis on the Green," May Atlantic) writes, "I approve of tennis's transformation thirty years ago from an upper-class diversion to an inclusive public sport." In 1983 I suggested as much to Pauline Betz, the great champion of the 1940s, and she quickly quashed my notion of exclusivity. She and the other great champions all grew up playing on public courts. Of twenty-six world champions I interviewed for my book, Once a Champion, only Boston's Sarah Palfrey had a privileged background.

If you were to tell Don Budge, Alice Marble, Louise Brough, Jack Kramer, and Gardner Mulloy, all of whom played before World War II and in its aftermath, that the game they played so well was an upper-class diversion, you'd be ducking tennis balls whizzing at your noggin.

Stan HartWest Tisbury, Mass.

Marshall Jon Fisher replies:

Stan Hart is absolutely right. I should have written "over the past hundred years" instead of "thirty years ago." I hope that Don Budge et al. are not subscribers.

Advice & Consent

Regarding "Slow Squeeze, by Michael Kelly (The Agenda, May Atlantic): As a person involved in the B-52 activities during 1968, I would like to correct a misleading statement that the bombing campaign ended on October 31, 1968. I believe that Michael Kelly meant to say "Bombing north of the DMZ in North Vietnam ended on October 31, 1968." Certainly considerable bombing occurred in that theater of operation until well into the 1970s.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

No other place mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth so well. What’s its secret?

If the American dream has not quite shattered as the Millennial generation has come of age, it has certainly scattered. Living affordably and trying to climb higher than your parents did were once considered complementary ambitions. Today, young Americans increasingly have to choose one or the other—they can either settle in affordable but stagnant metros or live in economically vibrant cities whose housing prices eat much of their paychecks unless they hit it big.

The dissolution of the American dream isn’t just a feeling; it is an empirical observation. In 2014, economists at Harvard and Berkeley published a landmark study examining which cities have the highest intergenerational mobility—that is, the best odds that a child born into a low-income household will move up into the middle class or beyond. Among large cities, the top of the list was crowded with rich coastal metropolises, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York City.